Page 40 of A Velvet Kiss After Dark

She was hopeless. As maddened, but worse, than him…and he was the only one on this entire planet who knew it, who understood it, who knew there was no way to fix crazy. And the bitch was beyond crazy.

"WHY WON'T YOU LOVE ME, WOMAN?" he shouted.

He lurched to his feet in anger and pounded his fists against the door, shaking it in its frame. He was unable to see her, but she damn well heard him. He had to lock his own beloved mate in this God-forsaken "cellar" for her safety and for the safety of his pack. The very idea of imprisoning her went so against his soul that he yearned for nothing more than to pull his very hair out and scream until he couldn't speak anymore and rip the flesh from his arms until he bled to death in a burning grave of anger and angst and pain and suffering!

For that is how she felt inside and that is how he mirrored her as they each corresponded together through their hearts and minds, through their sacred soul's path that had been deemed since before birth that she was his and he was hers.

She cackled, truly cackled, and the sound made his skin crawl as if millions of spiders creeped up his arms. It was a loathsome, sickening sound. The gentle soul he'd spent hundreds of years adoring and coveting was now more evil than evil itself.

It was Lesther the Magician, Lesther the Revenant, Lesther the freakish wannabe "God" who had done this to her, had kept his precious betrothed hidden away with filthy magic and dark workings, until her mind had turned haywire, frozen in time and darkened with menace.

She'd killed a dozen of his guards.

Twelve real men with real wives and real children. They despised their Alpha now and had long excommunicated themselves from his treachery, according to them. Ezekial couldn't even attend the funerals as their family's lit their beloved ones afire and cast them to the great beyond with sobs and sorrow. How could he even show his face to his own pack now? Not easily.

Ezekial the Reclusive One. His own moniker he'd thought up, seemed like a laughable thought now as it became permanently etched in his mind. He was reclusive. This was a fact. And, it was because of her. The very same woman he couldn't deny his need to correct and fix, for if he hadn't been so naive as to trust Lesther all those years ago, the insane revenant never would have taken his wife. It was his fault she was broken. It was his fault her perfect shell had been broken and breached beyond redemption.

He could protect her, but the cost was steep and growing worse by the day. Her magic seemed to grow like poison. Even now as he fumed in the cellars below his home, he saw black viscous goo-like ivy growing across the door. It had begun yesterday, and now covered more than ever. What venom was this? He didn't know, but he feared touching it.

"How could I ever love a filthy mongrel?" hissed her sinister voice through the doorway.

He shook his head. It wasn't her voice, yet it was. Once a powerful white witch, the ability to heal humanity, to heal his kind, to heal anything, to grow and nurture love and abundance and fertility had been spoiled like the blackest of dirt, like the filthiest of whoredom. She was wasted. Hundreds of years lost to find her, mated to none but her, wasting no time in trying to find her, worrying she was dead, yet knowing that their spiritual connection told him that she still lived. But, at what cost?

And, as the years crept by, bitterly, slowly, he'd lost his mind ever more and ever more, and now he could see; Ezekial could truly see, that he'd only lost his mind, because she'd lost hers. So tethered was their bond, one unable to part from the other.

She was blackest witch of them all, and there was nothing fixable about her. She was doomed, because he knew there was only one out from here, and it was death. If he couldn't fix her, he'd go down in flames with her.

He'd bide his time for this frivolous relic. In his maddened state, he envisioned it working—dismantling, somehow, her of her disastrous ways, for her power as enormous and unalterable. She could brew storms that wrecked the whole village, she could squash a werewolf with a thought using nary a droplet of blood. For blood was the cost of her magick. Give her a drop, and she'd drop you dead. Give her an army of blood, and she'd ripped your intestines inside out and strewn you from that white picket fence you built! He knew, because that's what she did to his fellow pack members. Slaughtered them like babes with nothing more than her psychic craft from her mind, and tiny bit of bloodletting.

It was hopeless.

She was hopeless.

And so he raged.

"What is this black venom growing on my door, wife?"

"'Tis naught," she whispered back, her voice that of a deranged mad woman.

He growled, the sound more werewolf than man. "Remove it, woman. What magic have you cast?"

After all, she required fresh blood, of which she had none in her room, to cast magick.

"'Tis naught," she said gaily, her voice bright and cheery like a child's. It grated his nerves.

'Tis something, he thought mockingly, but he bit his tongue.

One of his soldier's approached him. "Alpha, should I test the substance?"

"No, don't be alarmed," he said. "I don't want anyone else hurt. It's likely a contaminate."

The soldier nodded and left.

"Perhaps some more tuna?" she called in that same childish squeak.

He made sure it had been blackened as coal, when he'd given her the decrepit tuna substance.

"It'll be fresh garden greens for you from here on out." No meat. Perhaps the meat had given her some power, he thought?

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